The M&M Boys: A Profile in Civility

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The Yankees' Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle in the clubhouse after a game against the Orioles on Sept. 20, 1961, in Baltimore. Mantle missed games at the end of the season because of a hip infection.CreditCreditHerb Scharfman/Sports Imagery via, Getty Images

By Michael Beschloss

May 22, 2015

If this tale were fiction, the contest between the duo renowned as the M&M Boys might seem too contrived. In the summer of 1961, the Yankees’ Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle competed to break the home run record of a Yankee predecessor, the most famous baseball player of them all, Babe Ruth — 60 during the 1927 season.

For later generations, the two men established an abiding lesson in civility and friendship. Resisting some fans and reporters who were determined to pit these two very different Yankees against each other, the irrepressible, sometimes loutish Mantle, from Commerce, Okla., and Maris — the headstrong, introverted Croatian-American from Hibbing, Minn., and Fargo, N.D. — managed to keep their rivalry under control.

In those days when major league players did not live as large as they do today, they even resided — at Maris’s invitation — in the same $251-per-month apartment (along with Yankees outfielder Bob Cerv, in Queens, near what is now called John F. Kennedy Airport, with Maris sleeping on a green sofa).

Unlike Mantle, the self-contained Maris, 26 in 1961, did not much resemble Ruth, the quintessential New York Yankee.

Mantle, 29, was already completing his first decade as a Yankee — Maris had been traded to New York only the previous year (after brief stints with the Cleveland Indians and Kansas City Athletics).

As Tom Clavin and Danny Peary write in “Roger Maris: Reluctant Hero” (Touchstone, 2010), the sportswriter Maury Allen recalled that unlike the “lovable” Mantle, “Roger knew intuitively that he was never going to be accepted as one of the historic Yankees figures.” As for the team, Allen said, “Mickey bought them dinner, bought them drinks, gave them the goodies,” and they “wanted to experience the reflected glory Mantle brought.” Maris once said, “Even the Yankee clubhouse attendants think I’m tough to live with.”

Therefore, in Yankees world, Maris was “not only fighting the memory of a dead hero” but a live one, explained Allen: “The whole Yankee fandom, the whole Yankee organization, the whole country wanted Mickey Mantle to break Babe Ruth’s record, and said, ‘Who the hell is this guy Roger Maris standing in his way?’”

“In a way, it was weird,” Mantle’s wife, Merlyn, recalled in a 1996 family memoir, “A Hero All His Life” (HarperCollins). “They sometimes booed Maris for hitting a home run.”

She noted that “Mick actually tried to help him with the press and the public.” Phil Pepe records in his 2011 book on the home run race, “1961*” (Triumph Books), that when Maris was booed, Mantle would joke, “Hey, Rog, thanks for taking my fans away.”

The two players laughed at stories that their contest had turned them into personal enemies. Mantle recalled that when Maris once brought the morning newspapers and coffee back to their apartment, he said, “Wake up, Mick, we’re fighting again!” Another time, when Mantle spotted a sportswriter next to Maris, he deliberately called out, “Maris, I hate your guts!” and the next day, the two men searched the papers to see if the reporter had succumbed to the ruse.

One reason that 1961 appeared to be the year when Ruth’s record could be broken was that, in order to accommodate new expansion teams, the American League had lengthened its schedule from 154 to 162 games. But in mid-July, just as the two Yankees seemed on track to catch the Babe, the Major League Baseball commissioner, Ford Frick, dropped a bombshell. He ruled that if a player “does not hit more than 60 until after his club has played more than 154, there would have to be some distinctive mark in the record books to show that Babe Ruth’s record was set under a 154-game schedule.”

Some explained Frick’s move as a blatant attempt to safeguard the legacy of an old friend, the Babe, at whose deathbed he had been present. Allen thought “what Frick did was take the joy out of the race” and “made it ugly.” Allen observed: “Mickey went along with it much easier than Roger, who took it very, very hard and personally. He felt: ‘They are making a ruling to hurt me. Babe Ruth is the Yankees and Mickey Mantle is the Yankees, and I’m an outsider.’”

Smoldering at Frick, Maris insisted, “I don’t want to be Babe Ruth.” He felt further wounded when a survey found that New York sports reporters endorsed Frick’s decree by a ratio of 2 to 1. After inflicting this blow, as Clavin and Peary wrote in their book, “these same sportswriters couldn’t understand why Maris wasn’t eager to open up to them the rest of the season.” An unsigned New York Times profile referred to “Roger’s perpetual anger.”

Feeling beleaguered by a hostile press, Maris later recalled: “It was as if I were in a trap and couldn’t find an escape. It was really beginning to get to me now.” One New York Times headline reported that “Maris Sulks in Trainer’s Room.” Mantle remembered that Maris told him, “I can’t take it anymore, Mick,” and that he had replied, “You’ll just have to.”

That September, with Mantle removed from contention by an infection, Maris failed to break Ruth’s record within Frick’s mandated 154 games. In The Milwaukee Journal, Oliver Kuechle snarkily wrote that when the Babe’s record was someday broken, “it should be by somebody of greater baseball stature and greater color and public appeal.” Kuechle insisted that “there just isn’t anything deeply heroic” about Maris.

But by the end of the American League season, the Yankees had won the pennant and Maris had achieved 61 home runs. “I tried,” a grinning Maris told reporters in the clubhouse. “I’m lucky I hit as many as I did. And now I’m completely relieved.”

After seven more years in baseball, Maris ran a Florida beer distributorship and died young at 51 of lymphatic cancer. Mantle, who served as a pallbearer, insisted that Maris was a “better person” and “better family man” than he was, adding, ”If anyone went early, I should have been the guy.” In the Fargo cemetery, Maris’s baseball-diamond-shaped headstone reads “61” and “Against All Odds.”

Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa later fought to break Maris’s home run record, but that is a complex story for another day. In 1991, the M.L.B. commissioner, Fay Vincent, backed by a panel for statistical accuracy, concluded that Maris had not been given “his due” by record books that cited both him and the Babe as holders of home run records in seasons of different durations.

Instead, the commissioner insisted that there be a single record for the most home runs in a season, which should be awarded to Roger Maris.

Vincent told sportswriters, “We corrected a wrong done to a good man.”

Michael Beschloss, a presidential historian, is the author of nine books and a contributor to NBC News and “PBS NewsHour.” Follow him on Twitter at @BeschlossDC.